This year my sister bought me an Arduino as a birthday present and I have had great joy playing with it the last few days. An Arduino is a microprocessor, or in essence, a tiny computer that you can program. It has thirteen pins of digital input/output and six pins of analogue input, meaning that it can turn on thirteen different circuits (let's say, light bulbs) and read six sensors (let's say, light levels).

As a bit of a nerd, this is so cool. I find it so interesting since the possibilities are endless. I can buy a gps module for it and create my own home made gps unit. I could program it with the location of every seven eleven in the city and make it beep whenever you got within one hundred yards of one. I could buy an ethernet jack for it and turn it into a server. You could go to a web page to see the temperature of my apartment and if the lights are on. It could monitor the moisture of a (or up to six) potted plant and send me an email when the plant needs watering.

I am going to have lots of fun experimenting with this. Since I have an ethernet jack on order for it, prepare to see some links to strange projects on my Arduino in the near future.